Isolate tasks to gain Integrity

Eli Lopian    Management for Geeks    

I have talked a lot about integrity, this is our management style in Typemock  and the way we bring ourselves to excellence. But your team members might not work with integrity, even if you have explained it to them, it still takes time to understand.

When this happens, as a manager you have a chance to help your team to grow and expand, buy confronting them.

Here is a how to confront them:

What we see in the picture are the 3 circles of influence.

The inner circle are stuff that depend on me. For example: Brushing my teeth. This is something that I have full control on and so I have maximum ability to do it, there is no excuse for not doing it except that I didn’t want to do it.

The center circle are things that I need the help of others to complete. Most of the things we need to do fall in this circle. In order to complete this we need to Isolate what tasks we can do by ourselves and what tasks do we need the help of others. Once we do this we can do the tasks that depend only on me, and move to the inner circle.

How do we isolate the tasks? We need to see what we can do ourselves and get a commitment from our colleges to do the things that we can’t.

For example: Writing a help section for a new feature. I can write the technical help, but I need a technical writer to reword and format it. Now I need to isolate the tasks and move to the inner circle. I can ask the tech-writer if s/he can commit to formatting the help section. Once s/he does I can commit to writing the help section (back to inner circle).

The outer circle are things that I have no influence at all to complete the task. In this case, we have to find out what tasks we can do.   

For example: Selling our product, I have no influence on whether a developer will buy or not. What I can do is offer our product to many developers, and some will see the value and buy. So we have moved back into the inner circle again because offering is a task that I have maximum influence (I can always offer and explain our product benifits).

Back with Integrity

To move back to working with integrity, we have to isolate the job at hand and move to the inner circle, then get the team player’s word that he will do it. Once we are in the inner circle, it is easy to do the job.

When we do do it, then we deserve appreciation, don’t forget to praise.
If we didn’t. There must have been a catastrophe. Either a real catastrophe happened or they team player has no respect for his word, which is a catastrophe.

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